What the U.S. Can Learn About Democracy From Latin America

The Atlantic

a day ago

Imagine a couple of bros recording a video podcast in which they get together to swap compliments while casually chatting about vaporizing due process. This is roughly what it felt like to tune in to President Donald Trump's joint press conference with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in the Oval Office in April. First came the mutual praise. 'I want to just say hello to the people of El Salvador and say they have one hell of a president,' Trump started. Bukele expressed delight at meeting 'the leader of the free world.' Later in the conversation, Trump told Bukele, 'You sort of look like a teenager,' playfully slapping his arm.
The pair then turned their attention to the extrajudicial transfer of dozens of Venezuelan migrants held in the United States to the notorious Salvadoran mega-prison known as CECOT (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo), as well as the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who had been mistakenly deported to El Salvador by U.S. authorities. Asked by a reporter if he would facilitate Abrego Garcia's return, as mandated by the U.S. Supreme Court, Bukele asked coyly, 'How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?' Trump bobbed his head approvingly. (Abrego Garcia was ultimately returned to the U.S. earlier this month.)
This confab was the latest brutish two-step in a decades-long political dance between the U.S. and El Salvador. In the 1980s, the U.S. gave billions of dollars to murderous right-wing factions during the Central American nation's civil war, fueling the conflict and destabilizing the country. In the '90s, the Clinton administration began deporting Salvadoran immigrants convicted of crimes in the U.S. back to their homeland, a move that helped propel the rise of powerful gangs in a country that was institutionally weak after years of war. Rising gang violence then led thousands of ordinary Salvadorans to flee to the United States. The chaos laid the groundwork for the rise of Bukele, a man who once described himself as ' the world's coolest dictator. ' And now the U.S. is paying the country to house Venezuelan migrants, including many whose greatest crime seems to have been seeking asylum here.
This feels like more of the same, but with an awful new twist. American intervention in Latin America has often been premised on the condescending notion that the U.S. is a forbearing parent, the stable democracy tasked with maintaining order in its hemisphere. But now that our country has deployed the military against its own citizens in Los Angeles, taken a Constitution-shredding approach to deportation, and defied court orders, it might be Latin America's turn to offer guidance. Latin American nations, for all their political convulsions and repressive periods, have a rich history of social movements grounded in collective ideals. As some historians talk about Trump as a strongman in the Latin American mold, perhaps the region has something to teach us about democracy.
Trump's regime makes the arrival of the historian Greg Grandin's ambitious new book, America, América: A New History of the New World, incredibly timely. His previous, Pulitzer-winning book, The End of the Myth, incisively explained how U.S. expansionism gave way to the border-wall isolationism of the Trump era. In America, América, he expands the frame. Over 768 pages, Grandin gives us the sweep of history: the bloodshed of colonization, the movements for independence, manifest destiny in the U.S. and caudillo rule in Latin America, a pair of world wars, the Cold War, and the growing polarization of the 21st century.
The author is not the first scholar to tackle the history of America—as in the American continent, not just the United States (which keeps trying to hoard the name for itself). The British historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto's 2003 book The Americas: A Hemispheric History covered the shifting fortunes of the continent's Anglo and Latin American nations over five centuries. But that work was more limited in scope, and in the two decades since it was published, a new generation of caudillos has arisen, including Bukele, Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro, Argentina's Javier Milei, and Trump.
America, América brings us to the present. It also offers a fresh look at the past, primarily focusing on the British and Spanish empires and providing a deep analysis of the ideas upon which both were built and governed (for better and worse). Grandin considers, for example, how both empires contended—or didn't—with the ethics of conquest. And he goes deep on the ways that the Monroe Doctrine shaped U.S.–Latin America relations over two centuries. When President James Monroe declared in 1823 that the Western Hemisphere was off-limits to future European colonial projects, his proclamation was received as a statement of solidarity by newly independent Latin American nations. But it quickly became 'a self-issued warrant for the U.S. to intervene against its southern neighbors,' Grandin writes. Within two years, the U.S. was actively undermining Mexican President Guadalupe Victoria; military incursions in Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, and Puerto Rico followed. By the middle of the 20th century, Cold War paranoias about left-wing movements, spurred by the revolution in Cuba, led to, in Grandin's estimation, 16 U.S.-aided regime changes from 1961 to 1969—including one in El Salvador, which put that country on the slippery slope to civil war.
This is a big and unwieldy book—and it could have made for arid reading. But Grandin has a knack for enlivening theory with anecdotes that are both enlightening and appalling. A section detailing the independence movement in Venezuela, for instance, features a novelistic tangent about a royalist caudillo named José Tomás Boves, who attempted to beat the reformers back: He gathered an army to seize the capital of the newly independent nation, brutalizing anyone who stood in his path. In Cumaná, he held Caracas's republican orchestra captive and ordered the musicians to play waltzes as his soldiers danced with the town's widows. 'Blood from the day's killing still moist on their boots turned the dance floor red,' writes Grandin. 'As the orchestra played, Boves took one musician out at a time to be executed.'
Although such gory tales push the story along, what makes América, America instructive is Grandin's focus on the way that Latin American thinkers have advocated for important social rights from the very foundation of their republics. For starters, many early independence movements in Latin America were linked to the abolition of slavery—most notably in Haiti. The South American liberation leader Simón Bolívar emancipated the slave laborers who worked on his family's estate—unlike George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Moreover, the constitutions of many Spanish-speaking republics went beyond enshrining individual rights, also offering protection to el bien común de la Sociedad ('the common good of society'). Mexico's constitution was the first in the world to guarantee birthright citizenship. Venezuela's first constitution included nine instances of the word social and 15 of the word society, Grandin writes: 'Neither word appears in the United States Constitution.' Venezuela's remarkable document declared, 'Because governments are constituted for the common good and happiness of men, society must provide aid to the destitute and unfortunate, and education to all citizens.'
Certainly, there was a gap between high-minded intentions and the actual application of the law. The abolition of slavery in Latin America didn't immediately eliminate it in practice, and that first Venezuelan constitution was shortly replaced by another. But Latin America's ideals of el bien común have nevertheless helped shape legal codes into the present—including international law. Many of the ideas put forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, emerged from Latin America, including the equal treatment of men and women, the right to marry across racial lines, the right to health care, and the right to leisure time.
Grandin's narrative upends the idea of Latin America as perpetual victim, instead chronicling a tradition of leaders who have consistently fought for the social good. One particularly illuminating chapter traces the way that liberation theology, Marxist economic theory, and Latin American literature came together in the 1960s to articulate 'the intangible ways patriarchs, dictators, landlords, and foreign capital maintained their rule.' Grandin argues that this was 'a period of such intense intellectual vitality, it should be considered equal to European Enlightenment.'
Particularly poignant in the context of El Salvador is the story of Father Ignacio Ellacuría, a prominent Jesuit clergyman in that country who was part of a wave of Latin American theologians interested in liberating their communities from economic and political peonage. One of Ellacuría's central ideas was that the poor shouldn't be expected to roll over and accept their condition. He wrote that he aimed 'to bring the crucified down from their crosses.' These ideas, along with Ellacuría's attempt to broker a peace treaty between leftist insurgents and the government, were not well received by the military. In 1989, amid the chaos of the civil war, Ellacuría was assassinated as he slept, along with five other Jesuit clergymen and their housekeeper and her daughter. The perpetrators: members of the infamous Atlácatl Battalion, which had been created under the direction of U.S. advisers. The murder of these priests did not stamp out their ideas. Today, the priests are on the road to canonization, and an associate of theirs, Cardinal Gregorio Rosa Chávez, is one of Bukele's most outspoken critics.
As Grandin notes in his final chapter, the world is now experiencing the rise of a new generation of autocrats—among them Bukele, whom he criticizes for using CECOT as a site of a 'Dantesque display of fascist dehumanization.' But in Latin America's socially minded ideals, the author finds a way forward. 'Latin Americans know that the way to beat fascism now is the same as it was back then,' he writes, comparing our era to the rise of autocracy in the 1930s, 'by welding liberalism to a forceful agenda of social rights, by promising to better the material conditions of people's lives.' To take one example, the electoral rise of the socialist Salvador Allende in Chile didn't come about because the masses were being mindlessly seduced by leftist doctrine; it was a result of the tangible (and very reasonable) reforms that Allende delivered: literacy programs, an expanded education system, increased pensions for widows, free lunches for schoolchildren, and workplace-safety regulations.
How might these ideas of el bien commún inform American social movements today? For now, Grandin has no more answers than anyone else. America, América focuses more on big-picture ideology than on the nitty-gritty mechanics of resistance. Unexamined, for example, are the ways in which the Catholic Church in Chile built institutions to resist the depredations of the military regime in the 1970s and '80s, helping set the stage for the liberalization that followed. There is a lot of material left to explore when it comes to overcoming the latest setbacks in the American continents' slow progress toward freedom. Perhaps it would be a fitting topic for Grandin's next book.